Is she or isn't she? AOC has a boyfriend who may or may not be a husband

What is it about the House's radical leftist squad pols and institution of marriage?

We know that Rep. Ilhan Omar, for instance, appears to have married her brother for immigration purposes into the U.S.

Now Rep, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may or may not be married to her live-in boyfriend, based on what her staff and her disclosures say. Something funny going on there, too.

According to the Washington Free Beacon:

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D., N.Y.) office says she isn’t married. But she has described her fiancé, Riley Roberts, as her "spouse" in forms filed with the House Ethics Committee in 2023, which has a strict definition of that term—"someone to whom you are legally married."

That could become a problem for the left-wing darling, since willful misrepresentations on the documents are a no-no—they could subject her to criminal prosecution, the forms state—and members of Congress are required to disclose the financial information of their spouses, which Ocasio-Cortez has declined to do.

But taken at face value, four legal filings submitted to the House Ethics Committee pertaining to AOC’s overseas travels in 2022 and 2023 suggest the pair have been legally married at least since Jan. 13, 2023. If that is the case, the "Squad" member can no longer leverage the so-called boyfriend loophole to evade public disclosure of his finances. While lawmakers are required to disclose financial information about their spouses, live-in romantic partners and fiancés are exempt from the rule.

So if she's married to this goofus, it's past time for him to disclose his finances to the House ethics committee the way normal congressmembers do, to ensure he's not out profiting from stock tips or has some unexplained income.

No such luck. Now her staff have come out and told the Beacon that AOC is not married to the big lovable lunk after all. He's home free on his finances. But she's on the hook for misstating their relationship as that of a "spouse" for official travel purposes, when disclosures forms require strict honesty and there plainly is a space on the form for "other" kinds of relationships, which she could have ticked off without any problem. According to the Beacon, an AOC spokeswoman claimed: "House Ethics has commonly recognized the term spouse to extend to long-term partners."

That's nonsense. There clearly was a space for "other" on that disclosure form but AOC chose "spouse."

It was weird stuff because it wasn't about getting a free ride. Ocasio-Cortez's staff also told the Beacon that the boyfriend paid for his trips accompanying her, which makes the spousal claim that much more puzzling.

As the Beacon mentioned, keeping the boyfriend a boyfriend was useful in getting him off the hook for financial disclosure. But as the Beacon noted, it was puzzling that she claimed him to be a spouse when he wasn't, there didn't seem to be an obvious advantage.

Sure, maybe she's just "a woman in love" and was posting her wishful thinking on her ethics disclosure forms, hoping the live-in boyfriend would actually marry her by declaring that they were married. Perhaps he was resistant to the idea on the grounds of, as the Puerto Ricans and Cubans say: "Why buy the cow when you can have the milk for free?"

But there's also a second possibility -- and all one has to do is look at the bizarre Clinton marriage: Why do that pair stay together despite Bill's dalliances? It's widely believed that it's because spouses can't be called on to testify against one another.

Maybe there are others still, but this one would mesh with AOC's many ethics issues -- from her taking an undeclared "gift" of $35,000 Met tickets for their famous gala, plus the use of a fancy designer evening gown and other stuff around that event, to deceptive fund-raising practices, to still other ethical issues. Making him "married" might be the best way to keep him from getting a subpoena to testify against her.

So it could be that, too.

What it really illustrates is the left's contempt for marriage as anything other than a legal convenience. These people don't believe in marriage. They believe in getting the best advantage for themselves from marriage. They can be married or not be married, but what matters is not love, or romance, or a sacred bond, but how it benefits them politically. It's just a device, a vehicle. This explains why they have so much contempt for everyone else's marriages.

Andrea Widburg wrote an interesting piece the other day about how the left coopts sacred institutions fro political purposes and pays lip service to their importance only when it's politically beneficial.

Which could be applied to AOC in this odd scandal, too. Is she, or isn't she? Maybe someone in Congress should ask. 

Image: Twitter screen shot

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